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Marketing Strategy – Every Advertisement Is Unique
By Joe Cavell | June 9, 2008
As a marketing consultant, business owners are always asking me to write an ad for their business. My minimum price for this service is $2,500 and on average the price is closer to $5,000. Talk about sticker shock!
What people don’t understand is that there is a lot of work and research that has to be done before I can even consider writing an ad. There are a lot of things that need to be understood and take into consideration before you can churn out even a simple advertisement. Then a master strategy for advertising, marketing, and selling your product needs to be created that takes into account your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) or inside reality and the customer’s needs. Poor results are assured to those who just make stuff that’s based on nothing more than a best guess of what you think will work. Just like the Boy Scout motto of Be Prepared, the same thing holds true for advertising. You need to develop a strategy, know what your prospects want, know the best way to talk to them, know the best way to get information to them, then and only then can you write an effective ad.
Let’s look at just a few things that need to be looked at before any writing can start:
Advertising objectives:
What is the ad trying to do?
Get orders
Get inquiries
Generate leads
Promote brand awareness
Target market:
Who are they?
What do they need to hear?
What format will they accept as valid?
What’s important to them?
Will they watch a DVD brochure or will a simple post card do?
What influences their buying decision?
Have they been burnt by a competitor before?
You’ve got to know all this before you start writing the advertisement or else it’s inevitable that you’ll be saying the wrong things to the wrong people in the wrong way and you’ll end up drawing the wrong conclusion…in this case about advertising.
Here’s the good news: it’s not THAT difficult. But it’s imperative that you create a master game plan for all of your advertising. Every ad you place should have a specific, predetermined purpose. Each ad should pull its own weight and make a profit for itself. We have clients all the time who will come running in and say, “Hey, I just got out of a meeting with the radio sales rep and they’ll give us a great deal on this block of airtime…what do you think?” Well…let me see your marketing plan and see if this “wonderful deal” fits into that plan.
Or a guy will say, “Look, I know that you say all that stuff about creating a whole marketing plan…but I really, really need a flyer right now. Can you just put that together real fast and then worry about the rest of the marketing plan later?” And the answer is…yes, but I can’t guarantee it will work! This exact thing happened recently with a guy who had an aluminum siding and replacement window business. Now I don’t know what you think about these telemarketing companies that call you all the time during dinner and ask you to buy siding for your house. I think they’re annoying. But since we’ve done a lot of work in the construction and the home improvement business, I already knew quite a bit about how to put his entire marketing plan together…before I did any of the preliminary leg work I just mentioned. Hey, after you’ve done this a couple of thousand times in a couple of hundred different industries, I would hope that you could put together a marketing plan for a siding company. I mean, come on, wouldn’t you get a little nervous if your heart surgeon was wheeling you into the operating room and was asking the nurse, “Hey, where’s the Heart Surgery For Dummies book?”
I unfolded an entire marketing plan to him, a strategy called the “Proficiency and morals agreement.” This happens to be an excellent strategy for good, honest companies who happen to be in industries that have problems with shady operators who have a reputation for being less than forthright with consumers – like siding contractors, for instance. I showed him how to integrate the strategy into his telemarketing, into his advertising, into his yard signs, into his tradeshow booths, into his sales presentations, and into every single aspect of his marketing. I’m talking about a full-blown powerhouse marketing strategy that would absolutely annihilate every one of his competitors. And his brilliant comment was, “Yeah, but right now I just need the flyer that my guys can stick on people’s doors. Can you do that?”
The answer is NO!!! Why? Because a single flyer just creates an outside perception that the inside reality can’t support. You just can’t shortcut the system. You can’t just slap a couple of techniques on there and hope you’ll get stellar results. You’ve got to take the time to put the plan together and build a case that convinces your prospects that it’s worth their time and money to even consider doing business with you.
Topics: Advertising, Internet Marketing, Marketing | No Comments »